No-one wants to know why it ‘worked’ – extending change through capturing process

Reflecting on the design of many monitoring and evaluation programs, and the pace of program and funding/grant design, it is interesting to note that our focus is still very much on outputs and outcomes and not on the process that underpins these. This is an instrumental view of ‘did we get bang for our donor buck?’ That is, ‘did it make a difference?’, which is, of course, a very important question. But even if we establish this and find that yes, indeed, the funded activity did ‘work’, there is little interest in what next. If we are committed to social change, for both social and economic reasons, then we need to achieve both this instrumental goal of delivering something that made a positive difference, AND also identify how and why it worked, SO THAT we can scale the positive benefits of this activity by replicating and adapting it elsewhere.

In monitoring and evaluation requirements there is little, if any, emphasis on identifying and documenting the ingredients of project design and practice that affect, even cause, outcomes. This question asks: what does it take to make it ‘work’? To do this, we need to imagine how to explain the project or practice to others who may wish to implement it. In clinical work, this is often captured in a ‘protocol’ that must be followed for outcomes to be achieved. In community and social change work, while very contextual and unpredictable, we can all point to key ingredients of success. While contextual, these ingredients shouldn’t be ignored as simply ‘local’ factors – they point to important characteristics of success that can be replicated if others understand what they are and their importance. These need to be identified and added to a more procedural list of steps or stages of project/practice implementation.

In designing our projects and evolving our practice models, we need to think about how we embed the change we wish to see, both at the local level and more broadly. While there are a raft of strategies to draw on here1, a key starting point is to identify the ingredients of what made this practice/project ‘work’. Unless we know this, we can’t replicate it and extend the change, and nor can anyone else.

1.      An example of this work is discussed in a forthcoming book chapter (with my colleagues Elena Jenkin, Robert Campain and Kevin Murfitt) ‘Embedding change: designing short term projects for sustainable effects’ to be published in the edited book A. Taket and B. Crisp (Eds.) Sustaining Social Inclusion published by Routledge.